In the fall of 1920 in Paris, Tristan Tzara, poet and co-founder of Dada,
embarked on an epic project to compile an anthology of works created by an
international group of artists aligned with his avant-garde movement. Tzara’s
goal was to print 10,000 copies of the book and call it Dadaglobe.
Unfortunately, his ambition far exceeded his fundraising talents, and as a
result, the project, slated for publication in 1921, never reached completion.

Tzara—with help from his friend and fellow Dadaist Francis Picabia—had
written to 50 artists from 10 countries asking them to submit artworks to be
considered: these could be photographic self-portraits, photographs of art,
original drawings, designs for book pages, prose, poetry, and other verbal
“inventions.” Over the course of the year Picabia’s apartment had become
jam-packed with correspondence.

Now, following six years of archival research by Dada scholar Adrian
Sudhalter, many of those fragments of the never-realized whole have been
assembled for the exhibition “Dadaglobe Reconstructed,” on view at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. The display might be seen as either the
remnants of an unrealized project or as Dadaglobe’s original intention
finally coming to fruition.

Among the fragments on display is Max Ernst’s pioneering work of
photomontage, Die chinesische Nachtigall, The Chinese Nightingale.
It is both a photograph of a sculpture set on a lawn and a collage work. The
sculpture depicts an anthropomorphic bomb (used by the British in World War I)
with a pair of outstretched arms and a piercing eye—a portrait of distress.

“Had it been published in 1921, Dadaglobe would have recorded the
activities of Dada at its climax and before its decline,” as Jeanne Brun wrote
in the catalogue to French curator Laurent Le Bon’s 2005 Dada exhibition at the
Centre Pompidou. The failure of Dadaglobe, according to Brun, seemed to
lay in the “incapacity” of the Dada movement to have its “essence . . .
congealed in one single publication.”

One wonders whether Tzara grasped the complicated nature of his endeavor
from the start. Apart from financial issues, personality conflicts, too, also
contributed to Dadaglobe’s demise. Was Tzara perhaps a bit naïve in
believing that so disparate a group could achieve such a cooperative feat? Or,
maybe, Tzara always suspected that Dadaglobe was destined to exist less
as a Dada-defining publication than as a provocation.

Jean Cocteau, for instance, wrote above an image of himself in Self
Portrait on Pablo Picasso’s Horse, “I’m not a Dada, but I’ll amble in your
book.”

By bringing these pieces together, “Dadaglobe Reconstructed” represents
the long-term ripple effect of the creative explosion triggered by Tzara’s
invitation. More than chronicling what Dada was, these pages reflect the
artistic freedom that Dada would inspire for years to come.

Another page, Portrait of André Breton at Festival Dada (with Picabia
placard) is a photograph of Breton with his head poking out of the top of a
sandwich board. He offers a playful sideways glance as his right hand points
toward a large bulls-eye and the accompanying text (translated from the
French), which otherwise obscures the bulk of his body, reads, “In order to
love something you need to have seen it or heard it for a long time you bunch
of idiots.”

samedi 13 août 2016

Andre Breton, Dada’s
Taciturn Target

THE
DAILY PIC (#1585): “Dadaglobe Reconstructed” is precisely the kind of show that
the Museum of Modern Art should be doing, and very often has done of late.
Memories of “Bjork” have pretty much been erased by an absurdly full roster of
utterly unpandering projects.

For “Dadaglobe,”
curators have labored to unearth a vast trove of material once intended for
what was supposed to have been the ultimate anthology of the Dada movement. The
book was planned in detail by the Romanian avant-gardist Tristan Tzara, in
Paris around 1921, but a lack of funds torpedoed it late in the process. All
that remains are Tzara’s detailed records and the art works themselves that
he’d meant to include, which MoMA has tracked down in surprisingly large
numbers.

Today’s Pic is one
of my favorite objects from the Tzara project, and from the MoMA show, because
it does such a perfect job of summing up modern art’s love of the new, and its
disdain for those who resist it. An unknown photographer has captured a
dandified André Breton, not long
before he helped found the Surrealist movement, at the great Dada festival in
Paris in 1920. For the occasion, Breton has put on a placard designed byFrancis Picabia, bearing
a target-like abstraction and the words “For you to like something, you have to
have already seen and heard it for ages, you bunch of morons.”

Among other things,
the placard’s concentric circles make an important point that we’ve lost sight
of: Abstraction, in its first years, always came with an edge of Dada absurdity
to it – and maybe still ought to, if it’s to keep its original heft.Jasper Johns, another
target-maker, knew this;Kenneth
Nolandshould have. Perhaps the utter sobriety of early
pro-abstract manifestos was meant to counteract any remaining odor of Dada.

I can’t help
feeling that Breton is quite literally and deliberately making himself a target
of jokes, with the text that he bears as the disdainful rebuttal of a voiceless
martyr. (The sacrificial effect is helped by the fact that he has centered the
target on his gonads.)

Breton’s silence
makes sense of another element in the photo, and in Tzara’s entire book
project, that I’m not sure has been much noticed.

He is holding a
copy of the very letter that Tzara sent out to solicit contributions to his Dadaglobe anthology. The sheet bears a carefully designed
letterhead that reads MoUvEmEnT DADA, with the alternating large-and-small type
that I’ve echoed here. The thing is, for any native French speaker who looks at
this photo, or even at the Dada letterhead itself, the large capitals, along
with the disappearingly small letters between them, can only make that mouvement read as muet – “silent” or “mute.”

Dada was a noisy
movement, for sure, and its artists enjoyed making a ruckus. But for all its
deliberate absurdity, it had a space of focus and concentration at its core –
as witnessed by the close-mouthed withdrawal of Breton in this portrait.

Dada pretended to
be all about anti-art, but its artists knew perfectly well that in the process
they were engaged in making great art, in the same lineage as
Leonardo and Rembrandt and other makers of the telling and silent tableau.